eco building materials and construction

Articles

Building Materials (Size 38K, PDF, Waitakere City Council)
It can be difficult to assess exactly how sustainable a product is and which materials are preferable to others. Often we have to rely on manufacturers information, which can be biased and incomplete.

Timber (Size 91K, PDF, Waitakere City Council)
Timber is the primary building material in New Zealand. It is relatively cheap, the building code makes designing with timber easy, and builders know timber frame structures are Core business for New Zealand builders.

Plastics (Size 45K, PDF, Waitakere City Council)
Because plastics are durable, inexpensive and lightweight, they have become a popular building material. They are the standard for most piping and electrical cabling; heavily used for vinyl flooring, furniture and furnishings and are even competing in areas like external cladding and window joinery.

Paint (Size 58K, PDF, Waitakere City Council)
Many surfaces in the average home are painted - furniture, walls, ceilings, wooden floors, exterior cladding, roofs. Paints have been used for centuries to make surfaces more attractive, easier to maintain, or to protect them from the elements. Paints and finishes can extend the lifetime of some materials, such as weatherboards, dramatically.

Earth Building (Size 305K, PDF, Waitakere City Council)
Earth is an ancient building material that is still used in many different ways with about half the worlds population still living in earth buildings.

Avoiding Construction Waste (Size 68K, PDF, Waitakere City Council) You can save yourself money and reduce your impact on the environment by considering resource use and waste generation during the design phase of a building project.

Site Earthworks (Size 154K, PDF, Waitakere City Council) Bare soil is picked up by rainstorms and carried away. A certain amount of erosion is natural, but an exposed earthworks site can generate a thousand times more silt than an undisturbed site.